Mantic Terrain - Painted and re-assembled

   Believe it or not, I managed to get most of my Mantic Landing Pad kit painted.  (minus a few parts that I am saving for a different painting experiment)  Hopefully the other parts of the Mantic Battlefront terrain line that +Matt Genuardi is shipping to me will get here soon, so I can try a few of the different wall panels!

Terrain connectors are fun to paint! (and other lies)

The most tedious part of the final painting run was knocking out the connectors.  I chose to paint them all in the Red Oxide color, as it complements both of the colors on the landing pad.  This part of the painting reminded me of that exercise in futility, when you cook a bag of frozen crinkle-cut french fries, and have to try to flip EACH ONE OF THEM halfway through the cooking.  Flipping all of these connectors was just a bit frustrating, and even more so when the paint spray flipped a few of them back onto their freshly painted side!  I haven't painted all of the connectors that come with the kit, in fact a bunch of them are still on the sprue.  I'm very happy to see the large number of them that you get with each kit, as it provides plenty of options and spares for the inevitable broken connector.

Before and afterthe first coat of metallic silver

   For the fans, pylons and stairs I chose to use a basecoat of Rust-Oleum Metallic spray paint.  This worked really well and gave them a nice, even , shiny silver base.  I'll be trying a few different washes on these, since I have 8 pylons and 8 fans.

   So how did assembly go?  Well, do you remember last time how it took me 30 minutes (or so) to get to the small building with a balcony finished?  This time from start to finish was 15 minutes.  Of course I did have to pull up the previous Mantic Terrain post on my blog to see how I had placed the balcony tiles. Now that the connectors were painted, everything fit a little bit more snug when being clipped together.  Of course with it being my second time through the process, I actually put some thought into the order that I built parts of the structure, and it resulted in a much smoother build.  I still managed to put the stairs in the wrong place, but that really didn't matter

   End result, build up and tear down, none of the walls looked any worse for wear, and the paint on the connectors was intact, other than where I had used a fingernail to push one or two into place.  In hindsight, a pencil eraser or other blunt object would be much better, but I obviously wasn't thinking along those lines!
   One of the connectors did break, with this being only the second time I've assembled part of this kit.  Am I disappointed? No.  There are plenty more available for me to use, and lets be honest, it is worth the risk to me for the flexibility that the kit offers.  So here is how the structure turned out.  There are a LOT more parts to the kit that I didn't use in this build, so maybe I'll have to post a few "useful" buildings that I can whip up over the next few weeks.

I guess I had better get to the washing and weathering phase to give this terrain a little more depth!

OVERALL THOUGHTS

   I really like this terrain from Mantic.  While it doesn't look very gothic, it still has enough of the fortress feel to it, and I have a feeling that nobody will care in the games that I play in our local gaming group.  It is frustrating that I've already broken one connector, but since I have plenty more, I'm not going to dwell on that part of the experience.  We will have to see if my odds with those improve once  I get more of the terrain pieces and start assembling multi-story structures. Having those extra pieces will allow me to have more building blocks pre-assembled, hopefully also reducing the wear and tear on the connectors.

   Let me know what you all think in the comment section below... would you allow this terrain in your local Wh40k games?